The group known as “The Poets of the
Palisades” gathers every New Years Eve to read poetry until
midnight and beyond, and to enjoy and renew literary friendships that
span decades. Two times the group met at a colonial bed-and-breakfast in Bristol, Rhode Island. This is a true account of the
strangest bed-and-breakfast visit of all time.
A
TOAST TO WENDY
by Brett Rutherford
1
Who
fired the cannonball that this colonial manse
(now B-and-B
a-host to poets!) caught up and lodged
in fireplace brickwork?
The British, of course, from bay,
a frigate bearing down on
Lafayette’s abode.
This red frame barn of a house leans back
in salt air,
sheds heat from six-paned windows against the
blizzard
of modernity. Its literary pilgrims
arrive on the
noon of New Year’s Eve, their papers
bulging from backpacks,
laptops, Dickensian journals.
They sign the open guest book: who
sleeping with whom,
or chaste with Byronic doom-gloom, whose
name is real
and whose pseudonymous, details of little note
as
the house is all theirs. The rooms are all for them,
theirs the
sole use the welcoming fire, the never-
exploding mortar of King
George the Third inert
to even the most outrageous manifesto.
Off
to their rooms they ascend on Escher staircase,
up front and
down back amid the heaped-up bookshelves,
hostess-hoard of
Brit-American volumes,
vestiges of her New York publishing
career.
Like as not the bookshelves hold this place
together
(Rhode Island shore a vast, connected termite nest
to
hear the well-off exterminators tell it).
The walls bulge.
Windows no longer square won’t open,
pipes rattle and hiss,
the wide-planked floorboards gap-toothed
beneath the
cat-scratched and faded Persian carpets.
The
stooping elder Anderson greets them; son James,
a new face to
them, lugs bags and reminds them,
“Wendy will not be with us.
She is gravely ill,
told us from hospital bed she wanted you
here.
No matter what, she wanted the poets again.”
Old
Mr. Anderson seems dazed and disoriented.
He shuffles away as
his son gives out advice
on local eateries. “Redleffsen’s
the best,” James says.
He counts up heads for the morrow’s
breakfast, assures
them he knows his way around the dim-dark
kitchen
that looms cool-cave behind the formal dining
room.
“We’ll get you breakfast, don’t fear. My father’s
no help,
but Wendy made me promise to help you out.”
To
the one he thinks is their leader, James adds:
“Of course a
large tip would be appreciated,
since I’m off to the ski
slopes once this is over.”
As
midnight nighs, the fireplace sputters, poetry
sparks up and
out, logs spurt out flame-salamanders,
to the lines of Thomas
Hardy, to their Gothic
utterances, Poe-reimaginings, wild
verse
salt-sown from Carthage in elephantine
revenge,
Baudelairean bleedings, achings of heart-sweet
first
love, oh what an overflow of unbashful
egos and peculiar tastes.
James has joined in,
“I just want to listen,” he says. So on
they go.
But when one translates from Russian (Akhmatova)
and
reads “I drink to our ruined house, Ya pyu
Nad razorenni
dom, James interrupts them, “No!
That is just too close
for comfort. Let’s not say that.”
So they veer away from
Russian. The Hardy book
makes another round with its bittersweet
savor.
The dining room clock then rattles out its
midnight
clamor; before twelve-stroke fireworks erupt
somewhere;
drunks who failed to kill deer fire off at the
heavens.
They break out the champagne. Glasses are passed
around,
and one spontaneously says, “Let’s make a toast
to
our absent hostess, a toast to Wendy!” “I'll join
in that,”
James answers, half-choking the words.
“A toast to our absent
hostess! A Wendy toast!”
They
drink, and being poets, they read some more, and more.
It goes
on till nearly two, till one by one and
two by two they rise to
go on up to their rooms.
“Listen!” James calls out to them.
“I could not say it,
while you were reading and sharing your
work with us.
But I can tell you now that Wendy — my mother
—
she died at ten o’clock this morning. Her last wish
was
that you all have your New Year’s celebration.”
2
Who slept, if at all?
Who lay awake
and
listened
as the bereft husband
in and out of
knowing
roamed in his bedclothes
mouthing, Wendy?
Wendy?
Then shaking
his head,
You fool, she’s dead.
Whose
door squeaked open
to Mr. Anderson’s plaintive
Wendy? Wendy?
Who
listens as through
the floorboards
James
phones his girlfriend
in Minnesota,
hears snatches of sentences:
“She
was doing well,
brain-tumor surgery and all.
They planned
to send her home,
but then the diabetes kicked in
and they
had to amputate
both legs.”
What
walked just then,
first up, then down
the
crazy-angled staircase;
who thought he saw
a
foot, a knee,
a calf,
a thigh,
then
rubbed his eyes
of sleep-sand
and saw
nothing?
“And
so I came home. First time
in a decade, to take my mom
to
New York in her wheelchair.
Just one last time she wanted to
see
the big tree at Rockefeller Center,
the lions at the
Public Library,
the Bethesda Fountain.”
And
who was it,
in search of toilet,
who saw and
heard
the pages turn
in an open book,
the Oxford dictionary
on its oaken lectern,
turn,
turn, turn of page
fast-furious,
yet not a hint
of draft?
Who would not wish to know
what
word was
sought
and by whom
or what?
“And
then it got worse.
Back to the hospital.
They must have
liked
her insurance policy.
This time they took her
arms.
Both of them.
What was the point?
She
died this morning.”
And
who, in their bed
where
the Gothic dame
and her platonic admirer
shared
one chaste mattress,
reached out the hand
that
made her yell
I
told you not to touch me like that!
And
just as he protested
That wasn’t me!
what
kicked him hard,
rolled
him clear off
the
bed to the floor?
That wasn’t me!
She cried.
“My
father. His mind is gone.
We were in the hearse.
Taking
her, you know.
And he had agreed
to God knows what,
signed
up for ‘the best’.
I lost it.
We have no money for
that.
We had a screaming fight,
right in the hearse,
and
so, it being a holiday and
all,
we never —”
What
roamed the rooms
so that every third book
was pulled from
its place
and left at shelf-edge?
The books, perhaps,
she
never got around
to reading?
What
rattled pots
in the kitchen
in the pre-dawn
hour?
No, that was not a poltergeist:
just
the quarrelsome son
and
the still-angry father.
“There’s
nothing fresh!
No
eggs! No milk!
How
are we going to feed
these
people?”
A
car roars off. As poets stir,
it
screeches back in.
Doors
slam. A coffee smell
wafts
up. Sun peeks
through
clotted clouds,
frowning on Bristol
and its half-frozen
bay.
3.
Sensing
the rancor and chaos backstairs
two poets brave the
kitchen.
They help, they set the table.
James does a
yeoman’s job of cooking
while Mr Anderson attends
to
a bin of dubious
potatoes.
He
wields a dull peeler
and just as well it is
they
take it from him
and hide away the
green potatoes
unfit for human eating.
Uncommon
quiet rules the table.
Some make attempts to thank the
Andersons
for hosting them despite calamity.
Each thing
James says just makes it worse.
“You’ll be the last guests
we’ll ever have,”
he tells them. My father is
incompetent,”
he says while his father stands right beside
him.
Breakfast
has
passed, and all have
breakfasted.
Bags at the door, hugs all around, glances
at
the parlor and its extinguished
fireplace.
James looks
at his watch, reminds
them
of his urgent need for ski-lift fees. Wallets
and
credit cards go and return.
At
the door, he tells the last of them:
“Sorry I didn’t tell
you that my mother was dead.
And what I really didn’t want to
say at all,
while all of you sat eating there, and
everything,
was that Wendy is in the freezer in the basement.”
